#Voyager 1 shuts off instrument to buy time before ‘Big Bang’ fix to extend the mission, #NASA sent a command on April 17 to deactivate the spacecraft’s Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, or LECP, in the hopes of saving power as Voyager 1 journeys farther from Earth by the day, according to the agency. The same instrument, which measures the structure of the space between stars, was turned off on Voyager 1’s twin, Voyager 2, in March 2025.

The probes launched weeks apart in 1977, each outfitted with a suite of 10 science instruments intended to aid their flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 is currently about 25.40 billion kilometres (16 billion miles) from Earth, while Voyager 2 is roughly 21.35 billion kilometres (13 billion miles) away.

They are the only active spacecraft beyond the #heliosphere, the sun’s bubble of magnetic fields and particles that extends well beyond the orbit of Pluto. Keeping the probes operating far longer than their expected lifespan of five years has meant shutting down different instruments over time to preserve each spacecraft’s limited power supply.

“While shutting down a science instrument is not anybody’s preference, it is the best option available,” said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at #NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“Voyager 1 still has two remaining operating science instruments — one that listens to plasma waves and one that measures magnetic fields. They are still working great, sending back data from a region of space no other human-made craft has ever explored. The team remains focused on keeping both Voyagers going for as long as possible.”

Three functioning science instruments remain on Voyager 2.

Engineers hope the latest sacrificial move can keep Voyager 1 operating long enough for the team to potentially roll out an upgrade, nicknamed “the Big Bang,” that could allow the record-breaking probe to continue exploring deeper into space — and perhaps even restart some of its science instruments.
Teeing up the ‘Big Bang’ fix

Both Voyager probes run on radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or devices that convert the heat provided by decaying plutonium into electricity. Since the probes began flying nearly half a century ago, they have been losing an estimated 4 watts of power per year.

Managing the slow but steady power drain pushes engineers into a high-stakes balancing act. Turning off instruments and heaters in the frigid temperatures of interstellar space risks chilling the probes beyond repair. If the fuel lines freeze, the spacecraft would lose the ability to keep their antennas pointed toward Earth, and NASA teams would lose contact with them — effectively ending the missions.

Engineers believe that shutting down the majority of the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment will enable Voyager 1 to keep flying with two functional instruments for about one year. Extending the life of the mission for that long could bring Voyager 1 to its 50-year anniversary, a deadline that’s setting the stage for one of the team’s most enterprising steps yet.

The team will attempt to make a big swap on the Voyager probes, turning off some powered devices while turning on alternatives that draw less power — maintaining that balance of keeping each spacecraft warm while continuing to capture scientific data.

This “Big Bang” would occur all at once, for one spacecraft at a time. Voyager 2, which has a bit more power and is relatively closer to Earth, will initially serve as a test subject during May and June.

If the Big Bang is successful on Voyager 2, the team will attempt the same maneuver on Voyager 1 in July — and if that works, the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment may get a second chance to continue its crucial collection of data in interstellar space.

“With LECP we discovered properties and effects of cosmic rays and solar particles, and ‘sensed’ the changes in the region around us that determined when Voyager had crossed from the solar system into interstellar space,” wrote Matt Hill, principal investigator for the instrument at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in an email.

“We hold out hope that the Voyager engineers’ latest plan will be able to power up LECP on Voyager 1 again, to let us continue to learn whatever surprises await Voyager in these distant regions of space,” he added. “They have a good track record of seeming to perform miracles that stretch the remaining power supply, but eventually this streak will end.”
An unexpected dip in power

During a scheduled roll maneuver on February 27, the mission team noticed that Voyager 1’s power levels dropped unexpectedly. The spacecraft routinely executes such maneuvers to calibrate its magnetometer instrument, which measures magnetic fields and environments in interstellar space.

If Voyager 1’s power levels dropped any lower, such a decrease would trigger an autonomous failsafe called the undervoltage fault protection system. The system would shut down components on Voyager, and recovering anything that was powered down during the automatic process would require a lengthy and risky recovery effort by engineers on the ground.

“I think of fault protection as a safety net for a trapeze artist — it is there but really the trapeze artist should never let go of the trapeze,” Badaruddin said. “Fault protection puts the spacecraft in a safe state, but we must recover from it and ‘get back on the trapeze.’”

Fault protection also temporarily halts any transmission of science data from Voyager to Earth and adds the risk that science instruments may not properly turn back on, he said.

Mission engineers were ready to act and consulted a list they had compiled along with the science team years before about the order in which they wanted to shut down various instruments, while ensuring Voyager 1 could still carry out a viable science mission.

The Low-energy Charged Particles experiment was at the top of the list. For nearly 49 years, the instrument has measured charged particles like ions, electrons and cosmic rays coming from our solar system as well as the Milky Way galaxy more broadly. The measurements have provided unprecedented data about regions of varying density beyond the heliosphere.

The subsystems of the instrument include a telescope and magnetospheric particle analyzer, which have a 360-degree view, thanks to a rotating platform powered by a stepper motor.

That tiny motor, which only uses 0.5 watts, will remain turned on — which means the instrument itself could be revived in the future if there is enough power.

On Earth, the stepper motor was tested to about 250,000 steps, enough to operate during Voyager 1’s flybys of Jupiter and Saturn over a four-year span.

“The stepper has worked flawlessly for nearly 49 years and over 8.5 million steps,” wrote Stamatios Krimigis, principal investigator for the instrument at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in an email. “And, amazingly, it continued to step after we turned-off the LECP supplemental heater to save power, and its temperature dropped to –62 degrees Centigrade. This is the stuff that dreams are made of!”

By Ashley Strickland, CNN

A news release from the #Canadian Space Agency says this will be Kutryk’s first space mission.

During his mission, the Canadian Space Agency says he will conduct several international and Canadian science experiments, many focusing on health-related research and space station maintenance and operations activities.

#Kutryk is expected to launch no earlier than mid-September 2026 from Florida, along with #NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov.

NASA says the flight is the 13th crew rotation with SpaceX to the space station as part of its Commercial Crew Program.

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen returned from a 10-day lunar flyby mission earlier this month.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 23, 2026.

Catherine Morrison, The Canadian Press

Hybridizing #nuclear command, control and communications systems puts space infrastructure at risk. Space based nuclear command, control and communications (#NC3) systems were developed as highly classified and sovereign systems, insulated from external influence and designed to survive in the most extreme circumstances. Constructed in the 1960s, the systems made sure that states were able to reliably identify and retaliate against threats, maintaining deterrence stability.

#WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force awarded contracts to data analytics firms Leidos and MapLarge to support what the military calls battle management and command and control — the process of understanding what is happening in orbit, deciding what it means and directing a response.

Blue Origin launches rocket with used booster for first time. Blue Origin, the U.S. space company of #Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on Sunday successfully reused and recovered a booster for its New Glenn rocket, confirming its mastery of a technical feat that could boost its launch cadence and expand its rivalry with SpaceX.

But the uncrewed mission also suffered a partial setback: the satellite carried into space by the rocket did not settle into the right orbit.

The company has launched the New Glenn twice before, but only with new rocket boosters. It has previously launched its smaller New Shepard rocket, primarily used for suborbital space tourism, with reused components in a less technically challenging operation.

The novel recycling approach comes amid fierce competition between Bezos’s firm and fellow tech titan Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has also recovered a booster from a launched rocket.

The New Glenn rocket, standing at 98 meters (321 feet) tall, lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral with its reused booster at about 7:25 a.m. (11:25 GMT) carrying a communications satellite for the company AST SpaceMobile.

After liftoff, the rocket’s two stages separated, with the upper stage continuing its journey carrying the satellite into space. Its booster successfully landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean about nine minutes and 30 seconds after takeoff.

Blue Origin said later in a statement on X that the satellite turned on properly but was placed in “an off-nominal orbit.” The gravity of this error was not immediately known. The company said it was assessing the mishap.

In November, Blue Origin recovered a New Glenn booster for the first time, succeeding in the complex technical challenge that culminated with a controlled vertical landing on a floating platform.

A previous attempt in January 2025 to recover the booster was unsuccessful after its engines failed to reignite during descent.

The booster used in Sunday’s launch was refurbished after its previous flight. For this first reuse, the company replaced all of its engines and made several other modifications.

The New Glenn is at the heart of Bezos’s space ambitions as he competes with Musk in NASA’s Artemis lunar program, with their companies both developing lunar landers for the US space agency.

The United States is doubling down on efforts to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon in 2028, before the end of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term and a deadline set by Chinese rivals.

Space Force reorg signals end of SDA as standalone agency . Officials say the Space Development Agency’s ‘go fast’ model will live on under new portfolio-based organization

Canadian astronaut and Artemis II crew return to Houston.

#HOUSTON — Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen and his crew members received a standing ovation as they were welcomed back in Houston after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday, concluding the Artemis II mission.

Hansen expressed gratitude for his family, NASA, and the Canadian Space Agency. He said in French: ‘’I’m excited to come back to Canada with Reid, Christina, and Victor.’’

Still marvelling over their record-breaking lunar fly-around, the crew of four flew to Houston’s Ellington Field from San Diego on Saturday afternoon.

After a quick reunion with their families, the astronauts took the stage, surrounded by hundreds who took part in NASA’s historic lunar comeback.

“What you saw was a group of people who love contributing,” said Hansen, speaking on the level of commitment of the Artemis II crew.

Canadian Space Agency president Lisa Campbell hugged all four astronauts before she expressed how proud she was of Hansen and his crew members.

“You’ve represented the very best of what it represents to be Canadian,” she said about Hansen.

NASA’s Johnson Space Center director, Vanessa Wyche, said that beyond the data, the mission highlighted the connection between humans.

As the four astronauts stood side by side, linked arm in arm, Hansen said, “When you look up here, we are a mirror reflecting you, this is you.”

“It’s a special thing to be a human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth,” said Commander Reid Wiseman.

“The start and the end were human moments on Earth,” said American astronaut Christina Koch. She spoke briefly about understanding new levels of the word “crew,” concluding by saying, “Planet Earth, you are a crew.”

The crew accomplished many milestones on their 10-day mission, surpassing the Apollo 13 record for farthest crewed space flight from Earth and observing the lunar surface like never before.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 11, 2026.

--with files from the Associated Press

The astronauts. Their ride around the Moon.

The Artemis II astronauts pose for a group photo after viewing their Orion spacecraft — which they named Integrity — in the well deck of USS John P. Murtha following their splashdown.

#WASHINGTON — The first human mission beyond Earth orbit in more than 50 years successfully concluded with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean April 10.

The Orion spacecraft Integrity splashed down in the Pacific southwest of San Diego at 8:07 p.m. Eastern, ending the Artemis 2 mission. #NASA reported the four astronauts on board — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — were in good condition as recovery crews worked to extract them from the capsule and take them by helicopter to a U.S. Navy ship, the USS John P. Murtha.

“What a journey,” Wiseman, Artemis 2 commander, said moments after splashdown. He reported four “green” crewmembers, meaning all were in good shape.

The splashdown capped a rapid-fire series of events in the mission’s final hour as the spacecraft returned to Earth. The Orion service module separated from the crew module at 7:33 p.m. Eastern. Four minutes later, the crew module performed an 18-second “raise burn” to align the capsule for reentry.

Reentry officially began at 7:53 p.m. Eastern when the spacecraft reached the “entry interface” altitude of 121.9 kilometers. It was around this time that the spacecraft reached its peak speed of 39,688 kilometers per hour.

Plasma from the reentry triggered a planned communications blackout lasting about six minutes as the spacecraft descended into the atmosphere and slowed down. Two drogue parachutes deployed at 8:03 p.m. Eastern at an altitude of 6,700 meters, followed a minute later by three main parachutes at an altitude of 1,800 meters.

The reentry was closely watched because of issues with the same heat shield design on the Artemis 1 mission in 2022. The shield suffered more erosion than expected, which an investigation linked to heat buildup in Avcoat material that created gases that, in turn, caused cracks. NASA modified the heat shield design for Artemis 3 and beyond, but modified the reentry trajectory for Artemis 2 to limit that heat buildup as temperatures reached up to 2,760 degrees Celsius.

“I’ve actually been thinking about entry since April 3, 2023,” said Glover in an April 8 press conference, referring to the day the crew was announced. “Riding a fireball through the atmosphere is profound.”

Relay race

The splashdown concluded an Artemis 2 mission that lasted more than nine days, starting with an April 1 launch on a Space Launch System rocket from the Kennedy Space Center. After spending a day in a highly elliptical Earth orbit, Orion fired its main engine to place the spacecraft on a free-return trajectory around the moon, making the astronauts on board the first to travel beyond Earth orbit since Apollo 17’s lunar landing mission in December 1972.

Orion made its closest approach to the moon April 6, passing 6,545 kilometers above the lunar surface. It also set a new record for the most distant crewed mission, flying 406,771 kilometers from Earth. By splashdown, the mission had traveled 1,117,659 kilometers.

Artemis 2 was primarily a test flight of the Orion spacecraft, which carried humans for the first time after two uncrewed test flights. Astronauts spent the mission testing capabilities ranging from Orion’s manual control to various elements of its life support system.

Orion passed most of those tests, with NASA reporting only a few issues with the spacecraft. That included a wastewater vent line that became clogged, limiting the ability to empty a urine tank for the spacecraft’s toilet.

NASA also reported leaks in valves used to pressurize propellant tanks in the spacecraft’s service module. While that did not impair the ability of Orion to perform minor maneuvers on its way to and from the moon, NASA officials said April 9 they will likely need to redesign that system before the next Orion mission to the moon, Artemis 4 in 2028.

“We have loved living in Orion,” Koch said at the April 8 press conference, despite the cramped conditions that often have them bumping into one another or discussing how to best position themselves to carry out their work. “Everything we do in here is a four-person activity, but it’s also a lot of fun.”

The astronauts’ insights as well as engineering data will feed into future missions. The next mission, Artemis 3, is scheduled for launch by mid-2027. It will remain in low Earth orbit, with astronauts testing the ability to rendezvous and dock with lunar lander prototypes being developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX. Artemis 4, the first crewed lunar landing attempt, will follow as soon as early 2028, with Artemis 5 to follow as early as late 2028.

Koch said the team has worked to identify and update things that have not worked quite right during the mission, keeping those future crews in mind. “We’ve really just worked to make sure that they are set up for success.”

“This is a relay race,” Koch said. “In fact, we have batons that we bought to symbolize physically that, and we plan to hand them to the next crew. Every single thing we do is with them in mind.”

Welcome home, #ArtemisII crew! A successful and historic lunar flyby! Canadian CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen returns to Earth alongside NASA Reid Wiseman, NASA Christina Koch and NASA Victor Glover. Send your welcome‑back messages below! 🚀⬇️